Many residential communities have been wired with coaxial cable for delivery of TV signals from a cable TV station. The cable TV station is able to transmit a large number of cable TV channels through the coaxial cable to the homes connected to the coaxial cable. The cable TV cable has a large amount of bandwidth, and very often the cable TV station does not use all of the bandwidth of the cable to transmit the cable TV signals. Cable TV networks therefore often have excess or unused capacity on their cable TV cables.
Access to the Internet can be achieved in many different ways. The most popular, and usually the least expensive, is through a telephone connection between an Internet service provider (ISP) and a residential user. The Internet is becoming more and more popular and the amount of data available on the Internet is increasing. Residential users are requesting larger and larger amounts of data from the Internet. The data carrying ability of typical telephone connections is limited and many residential users desire a faster connection to the Internet than can be provided by a typical telephone connection. Cable TV companies have taken advantage of the extra capacity of their cable networks and have modified their cable systems to connect individual residential users to the Internet through their cable system. A description of a cable TV system which can also provide an Internet connection is provided in the publication Data-Over-Cable-Service-Interface-Specifications (DOCSIS).
There exists an interest in using the Internet to conduct real time voice conversations between two separate parties. These voice conversations would be handled much like telephone calls handled by the existing telephone companies. However the existing telephone system and the Internet operate very differently. The telephone system provides a dedicated connection between two persons during a voice call. When the voice call is initiated, the dedicated connection is created, and after the voice call has been terminated, the connection is also terminated. The Internet on the other hand, divides information into packets or cells. These packets or cells are individually sent out onto the network, mixed with other packets or cells and then individually switched from one path to another by switches in the network until the packet reaches its final destination. A voice call over the Internet, creates a large number of packets which must be delivered very quickly and very accurately. This places a high burden on the computer network. Voice calls also have typically large amounts of silence or quite periods, such as when one person is listening and not talking, or when a person pauses between words or sentences. The high speed and high accuracy is not needed during these silence periods.